The technology disclosed herein enables a service manager of a container orchestration platform to handle failovers of pods executing an application in a high availability mode. In a particular example, a method includes receiving pod information including unique application identifiers generated by the application and indications of which of the pods are active and standby. The method further includes configuring service objects provided by the container orchestration platform of the pods to each correspond to respective ones of the pods based on the unique application identifiers. The method also includes receiving updated pod information indicating a first pod of the pods, which was on standby, is now active having first application identifier of the unique application identifiers previously assigned to a second pod that failed. Additionally, the method includes reconfiguring a service object associated with the first application identifier to correspond to the first pod instead of the second pod.